Are Germany’s Intelligence Agencies and the Stasi Totally Different?

By Stephen Gowans, WHAT’S LEFT

Merkel

Merkel

Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel “has defended German cooperation with the National Security Agency program, called Prism, and rejected any comparison between it and the invasive methods used by the Stasi, the secret police of East Germany’s Communist government.”

“The work of intelligence agencies in democratic states was always vital to the safety of citizens and will remain so in the future,” Merkel said. “For me, there is absolutely no comparison between the Stasi in East Germany and the work of intelligence services in democratic states.” The programs are “two totally different things.” (New York Times, July 11, 2013)

Note that Merkel doesn’t deny that Germany’s intelligence apparatus, in collaboration with the NSA, spies on German citizens—only that its spying is vital for public safety. By implication, East Germany’s snooping was not. She invokes democracy’s halo to justify the police state methods of democratic states (if it’s done by a democracy, it must be good) while drawing a distinction with communist states (if it’s done by a communist state, it must be bad.)

At least Merkel has gone so far as to admit that Germany does what East Germany used to do—spy on its own citizens. Western politicians used to pretend that liberal democracies didn’t do that kind of thing (though there was plenty of public record evidence they did.)

Of course, Merkel can’t say that German secret policing is Stasi-like, at least, not in its intent, because the Stasi has long been held up by anti-communists as a sui generis—a totalitarian monstrosity that could only exist in a communist society. Germany’s surveillance activities, Merkel contends, are on an elevated (democratic) plane; they’re “vital to the safety of citizens.” The Stasi, presumably, concerned itself with baser things.

However, it’s clear that all states are concerned with preventing terrorist bombings, hijackings, assassinations, and so on—terrorist activities which endanger the public and disrupt the smooth functioning of the system. This was as true of the GDR as it is of any other state.

But the definition of public safety can be very wide, and states invariably place an equal sign between “public safety” and “the established order.”

The exodus of young, working-age and skilled East Germans to the West—encouraged by the West German government—threatened the viability of the GDR’s established order, and much of the GDR’s political policing involved measures to stanch the bleeding of human capital.

West Germans who identified with the GDR and were sympathetic to its political project represented a potential fifth column which the West German secret police operated to contain and disrupt.

And yes, there was a West German equivalent to the Stasi. It was built on the foundations of Hitler’s secret police, whose operatives were recruited from the ranks of former Gestapo personnel, and which used informants, buggings and mail openings to spy on, harass and disrupt the activities of people with left-wing political views, just as the Stasi did against people who threatened the viability of the anti-Fascist workers’ state.

In the view of those entrusted with preserving West Germany’s capitalist order within the orbit of US hegemony, communists and GDR-sympathizers were threats to public safety.

The scope of secret police activities is proportional to the technology available and the severity of the threat to be contained and disrupted. The threat posed to East Germany by the larger, richer West Germany and its powerful patron, the United States, was many times greater than the threat the smaller, poorer, East Germany posed to the West—a GDR whose backer, the Soviet Union, could offer fewer resources than the United States could offer West Germany. (Not only was the Soviet Union a less affluent backer, after WWII, it carted away from its occupation zone in Germany anything of value, and East Germany disproportionally bore Germany’s costs of indemnifying the USSR for the latter’s war losses.) Accordingly, the demands on a secret police function in the GDR were much greater.

To West Germans who had no strong leftist leanings, the secret police were invisible, but their existence was always clear and menacing to the country’s communists and militant socialists. The fact that the BfV, West Germany’s political police, was part of a “democratic” state made it no less intrusive and threatening than was the Gestapo to Germans who held the wrong political views.

So, are Germany’s secret police and the Stasi two totally different things, as Merkel contends? Not in kind, but they are in degree—though the difference in degree is not in the direction Merkel would care to acknowledge. The surveillance apparatus of Germany’s unified democratic state has a more intrusive access into the private lives of its citizens than the Stasi ever had or could have had.

Canadian social activist STEPHEN GOWANS  is founding editor of What’s Left.



Obama called “war criminal” & “hypocrite of the century” in Irish Parliament

It takes the genuinely righteous to rise to tell the truth. Brave, lucid Clare Daly almost by herself redeems the Irish people, so badly compromised by the Republic’s ill-advised politics of opportunistic collaboration, along with the EU, with the American empire. Note that during her speech, supporters of the alliance with Obama look discomfited, bored or annoyed, frequently trying to shut her down.

http://youtu.be/QIMucHfUMyg



How Tim Geithner Gets $200,000 a Pop to Chat With Big Banks

By Lynn Stuart Parramore [2]

Plutocracy servant Tim Geithner. Any surprise that Obama and Bush appointed this toady to high positions?

Plutocracy servant Tim Geithner. Any surprise that Obama and Bush appointed this toady to high positions and that now the same rotten establishment is paying him handsomely for essentially bullshit lectures?

Cashing in on the speaker circuit the minute you leave office is a well-traveled road in Washington. In recent decades, the number of speaking bureaus has mushroomed, and the negotiations often start even before the office is vacated. As Puff Daddy once sang, “It’s All About the Benjamins [3].”

Some former “public servants” hop on the gravy train by taking up lobbying. But the speaker circuit is getting to be just as lucrative.

 

When they’re not pushing a discredited austerity agenda that harms the public and enriches the financial sector and the wealthy, Erskine Bowles (former White House chief of staff) and Alan Simpson (former senator from Wyoming) get their bread buttered on the speaker circuit to the tune of $40,000 a hit.  (David Dayen notes [4] that this is three times the amount that recipients of Social Security can expect in retirement per year.) Who is paying them? Behemoth banks like Bank of America and Manhattan investment groups, naturally.

Former president Bill Clinton blows right past Bowles and Simpson, raking in an estimated $106 million [5] in speaking fees since leaving office, with individual payouts ranging from $28,000 to an eye-popping $750,000. Citigroup, Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, and Goldman have paid him up to $425,000 [6] a pop just to talk the sweet language of bank-friendly capitalism.

Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has wasted not a moment to shove his snout in the financial sector speaking-engagement trough. Geithner’s bank-centric worldview dominated the White House in the aftermath of the financial crisis, doing untold damage to ordinary Americans. As renowned economist Simon Johnson has explained [7],  “Geithner came to stand for providing large amounts of unconditional support for very big banks…” at the New York Federal Reserve and continued this pattern in Washington. He favored unqualified assistance to troubled banks rather than throwing out incompetent managers and directors or working to change harmful policies. The fact that we still have dangerous Too-Big-to-Fail banks on our hands is part of his dismal legacy.

The banking world is very grateful for Geithner’s championing of their interests over the public’s. Just six months after he left the Treasury in January, it has showered Geithner with cash. Deutsche Bank lavished [8] him with $200,000 to speak at a conference in June. Private equity groups are also shoveling over piles of dough: Blackstone and Warburg Pincus paid [9]  Geithner $100,000 each for recent speaking engagements.

Here’s betting your local PTA can’t quite pony up those fees.

Bribery, corruption, and using one’s office for private financial gain are nothing new in politics, but we are reaching a fevered pitch that may end up outdoing the days of 19th century robber barons. Last year, the U.S. ranked #19 on Transparency International’s list of countries [10] according to how clean the political system is perceived to be, just above Chile. Singapore, Australia, Canada, Germany, and Japan all ranked higher. The reason why the U.S. is slipping in the rankings? The tsnunami of money in politics, of course.

There’s an old saying, “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” Maybe that’s why Geithner’s theme song has always been, “I Left My Heart at Citigroup [11].”

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/geithner-speaking-fees


Ellsberg: Snowden Was Right to Flee the US

danielEllsberg

apers” whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg wrote an op-ed in Sunday’s Washington Post explaining why he believes that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden made the right decision in fleeing the country, rather than staying here and facing charges for leaking classified NSA documents about massive government surveillance programs that he believes to be illegal and/or unconstitutional.

“The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago,” writes Ellsberg, alluding to his own decision to stay in the country to face charges of espionage (which were eventually tossed out) in 1971 after he leaked thousands of pages of classified Defense Department documents to the New York Times and other media outlets about the purposely deceptive origins of the Vietnam War and lies told by American Presidents to support those deceptions.

“When I surrendered to arrest in Boston,” he writes, “having given out my last copies of the papers the night before, I was released on personal recognizance bond the same day.”

“For the whole two years I was under indictment, I was free to speak to the media and at rallies and public lectures. I was, after all, part of a movement against an ongoing war. Helping to end that war was my preeminent concern. I couldn’t have done that abroad, and leaving the country never entered my mind,” he explains.

In the op-ed, the iconic 70’s whistleblower goes on to echo several of the points he had previously made during my interview with him in mid-June, just days after Snowden outed himself as the leaker from an undisclosed location in Hong Kong: “There is no chance that experience could be reproduced today, let alone that a trial could be terminated by the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal in Richard Nixon’s era — and figured in his resignation in the face of impeachment — but are today all regarded as legal (including an attempt to ‘incapacitate me totally’).”

“I hope Snowden’s revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here,” write Ellsberg, adding that there is “close to no chance that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado.”

After Snowden outed himself, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo had expressed a thoughtful skepticism of Snowden and his motivations in this affair, though Ellsberg dismissed Marshall’s musings as “stupid and mistaken” when I asked him about the comments directly during my interview.

Today, Marshall says, he’s “kinda curious” about what Ellsberg meant in his op-ed remark that “The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago”…

“Both as a rhetorical question and a real question I’m curious just what Ellsberg means by that,” writes Marshall. “His basic argument is that he was able to stay out on bail and that wouldn’t have been an option for Snowden. On the other hand, the White House at the time was running a special operations team against Ellsberg out of the White House, including breaking into his psychiatrist’s office and at least some discussions of having him killed. So I’m not sure we can call those the glory days.”

Not “glory days”, certainly, but the sense I get from Ellsberg, in his op-ed, as well as from our radio discussion and other recent off-record conversations, is that he felt a certain sense of security at the time (rightly or wrongly) in the full faith and credit of both the Constitution and the American legal system. Those rock-bottom assurances of fairness in such cases, he now seems to be suggesting, are all but gone for whistleblowers like Snowden, as both the Constitution and the legal system have been almost unrecognizably twisted in order to serve any purpose of an Executive Branch, rather than to constrain it.

Moreover, while the rule of law has been bent beyond recognition to favor the prosecution, it is also being used (along with a remarkably helping hand by mainstream corporate media) to help keep the unconvicted accused from even being able to offer their side of the story in a fair and open process, should they choose, in the public realm.

Ellsberg spoke directly to those points in a bit more detail during our interview:

ELLSBERG: I think the current climate is such that if [Snowden] were in the country, we would have no more chance to hear from him than you or I or anybody has had from Bradley Manning. He’d be in jail, he might be in the same cell in Quantico — at best — as Bradley Manning was for ten and a half months, in isolation. Or he might be in Guantanamo.He would not be out on bond as I was 40 years ago. I was able to speak very freely in this country out on bond during my trial. And to speak not so much about my case as to the war, and to put my message out about the nature of the war and why it should be ended.

So he, Snowden now, from where he is, and he’s given more than one interview, has really been able to say how dangerous he believes this practice of total data gathering that’s going on on the American people, how dangerous that is. He’s able to say it in a way he couldn’t do in this country.
…
FRIEDMAN: So to you, this is now the only way really that whistleblowers can even get their side of the story out. They’ll be tarred and feathered or thrown in the brig as Bradley Manning was. Correct?
…
ELLSBERG: There’s no question in my mind that [Snowden] is a whistleblower in the best, complete sense. And he left the country and he did it for good reason.

In my case, as I said, there was a different country 40 years ago, where I was able to speak for so long. The things that were done against me, which included trying to “incapacitate me totally” at the orders of the White House, in other words, assault me or kill me, those were illegal then. And in fact they faced President Nixon with impeachment proceedings and led to his resignation. That’s very different. All the things that were done to me then including CIA profile on me, a burglary of my former psychiatrist’s office in order to get information to blackmail me with, all of those things were illegal, as one might think that they ought to be.

They’re legal now, since 9/11, with the PATRIOT Act, which on that very basis alone should be repealed. In other words, this is a case right now with Snowden that shows very dramatically the dangers of that PATRIOT Act used as it is. So the fact is that all these things are legal, and even the one of possibly eliminating him.

In fact, the treatment that accused WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning received — although his circumstances were somewhat different as a member of the military — underscores Ellsberg’s narrative here, that the law and Constitutional protections don’t mean much to a whistleblower who has had the wrath of God a President of the United States turned against him.

As Ellsberg reminds in WaPo, “The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture described Manning’s conditions as ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading.'” That finding was later confirmed by the U.S. Army Colonel serving as Judge in Manning’s military trial, when she found his confinement — which including months of being held in isolation in a windowless cell, often unclothed, for 23 hours a day — to be “excessive in relation to legitimate government interests.”

Though such a finding could, legally, have made Manning eligible for the dismissal of all charges, instead the judge reduced his potential sentence by 112 days. That would be 112 days off from what is a potential life sentence. As absurd as that all sounds — and is! — it might have been even more absurd still had prosecutors decided, as they could have, to have sought the death penalty in his case.

Even under the differing rules for a military court martial, the circumstances, the national mood, and, most disturbingly, the now-de rigueur willingness of the government to bend the law to meet their goals, does not seem to bode well for any national security whistleblower, much less someone revealing secrets with the impact of those leaked by Snowden.

Who, in their right mind, could take comfort, anymore, in the protections supposedly afforded by the U.S. Constitution at this point, especially in a case like Snowden’s? Remember also, we currently have 86 prisoners in Guantanamo Bay who have long ago been cleared by the government for release. Nonetheless, they have been held for years without charges, never will be charged, and yet they still sit as prisoners with little hope for release despite the fact that President Obama could, within his legal rights, send all of them home tomorrow.

That’s the world that Snowden, understandably, may wish to avoid. Why Josh Marshall wouldn’t appreciate that — whether he agrees with the decision or not — is somewhat puzzling.

“Snowden believes that he has done nothing wrong,” writes Ellsberg. “I agree wholeheartedly. More than 40 years after my unauthorized disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, such leaks remain the lifeblood of a free press and our republic. One lesson of the Pentagon Papers and Snowden’s leaks is simple: secrecy corrupts, just as power corrupts.”

Still, this story is not now, nor has it ever been, about Snowden, a point I tried to get back to during my KPFK/Pacifica Radio show last week when I spoke to a legal expert from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in hopes of refocusing on thesubstance of the actual disclosures made by Snowden to date. That’s what the story is, or at least, should be about — even if Snowden’s own circumstances in this framework do tend to underscore the secrecy, surveillance, and fully-militarized domestic “War on Terror” state seemingly run amock, with little hope for accountability, a full decade after 9/11.

“Snowden’s contribution to the noble cause of restoring the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution is in his documents,” writes Ellsberg, trying to return to the substance as well. “It depends in no way on his reputation or estimates of his character or motives — still less, on his presence in a courtroom arguing the current charges, or his living the rest of his life in prison. Nothing worthwhile would be served, in my opinion, by Snowden voluntarily surrendering to U.S. authorities given the current state of the law.”

“What he has given us is our best chance — if we respond to his information and his challenge — to rescue ourselves from out-of-control surveillance that shifts all practical power to the executive branch and its intelligence agencies: a United Stasi of America.”

 

ABOUT Brad Friedman

Brad Friedman is an award-winning freelance investigative journalist, blogger, muckraker, author and broadcaster. He is the publisher and executive editor of BradBlog.com, a co-founder of the government accountability and election integrity watchdog organization VelvetRevolution.us and a fellow at the Commonweal Institute. He is also the co-host of the nationally syndicated radio feature “Green News Report” and the host of his own weekly radio program on Los Angeles’ Pacifica Radio affiliate KPFK.



The End of the “Leaderless” Revolution

 A Global Fallacy and the Military Intervention in Egypt
by CIHAN TUGAL

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More than 10 million people in Egypt mobilized against a clumsy autocrat. Yet, their mobilization ultimately led to a military-judiciary seizure of power, with the support of centrist politicians and clerics. Call this what you like: coup d’état, elegant coup, or people’s power. None of these labels change the nature of the intervention and its aftermath: popularly supported military rule, by more or less the same military-police-judicial-business elements who were in power during Mubarak’s reign and who had struck a (shaky and incomplete) coalition deal with the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Tunisian and Egyptian revolts of the recent years sparked the imagination of many activists around the globe as “leaderless revolution”s. Yet, the strange amalgam of revolution, restoration, coup, democratization, and authoritarianism that persisted throughout the Egyptian process hints that different lessons need to be drawn from the Egyptian situation.

From a people’s campaign to the reassertion of elite rule

Tamarod, an unprecedented people’s campaign, collected millions of signatures and called for the downfall of president Morsi. Huge crowds gathered all around Egypt on June 30, 2013 in order to enforce the campaign’s call. According to estimates, around 15 million people took to the streets, making this the biggest rebellion in Egyptian history.

Ironically, the main mood among the protesters seemed to be pro-military. There were even groups that openly called for a military intervention. Among the protesters were not only pro-Mubarak civilians, but also thugs and Mubarak era security personnel who came to the square in their uniforms. Actually, during the month of June, it had become increasingly clear that the military intended to use the rebellion as an opportunity to intervene (and some politicians, who had previously made fierce statements against military rule, now welcomed the possibility in roundabout ways).

There were also other hegemonic forces bent on capitalizing on the protests and reinforcing their domination. For instance, Gulf intellectuals rejoiced in the troubles of the Brotherhood. They wanted a real Erdoğan as Egypt’s leader, not a “Taiwanese” version. They chose to ignore that their criticisms of Morsi (power-grabbing, centralization, authoritarianism, etc.) applied equally to their favorite Muslim leader. Regional hegemons thus suggested that the only way out of the Egyptian crisis could be another established path, rather than a truly revolutionary one.

There were calls for a general strike during the protests of June 30, alongside the louder calls for military involvement. In fact, the national situation that set the scene for Tamarod had a class dimension, though this was not articulated firmly as a part of its platform. Moreover, some groups in Tahrir (April 6, Strong Egypt Party, Revolutionary Socialists) openly protested against the military, not just the Brotherhood.
None of this, however, culminated in a roadmap that delineated the way out of the Brotherhood-military coalition (leaving the military and its new allies as the only actors capable of dictating the famous roadmap).

The uprising’s immediate result was the resignation of six ministers. Had a revolutionary political will crystallized in Egypt during the last two and a half years, it could have capitalized on this opening and declared an early victory; that is, it would have intervened before the Kornilovs of Egypt transformed it into their own victory.

When the military intervened, a few anti-coup speeches and slogans were drowned by the overall pro-military atmosphere in Tahrir. The unfounded optimism that anti-militarist forces would remain in the square until the military left did not change the main dynamics. Nobody mobilized Tahrir to fight their erstwhile torturers. Millions came back only in order to prevent the square from the Brothers.

Ultimately, July 2013 witnessed not only the removal of an unpopular president, but the making of a full-fledged dictatorial regime: A hasty crackdown rounded up hundreds of MB and non-MB Islamists. Many television channels were closed down. And most important of all, the military appointed an old regime cihanjudiciary figure to replace the president. The massacres that followed were the necessary ingredients that accompanied any military takeover.

Misinterpretations

Most of the initial responses to the military intervention missed the crucial point: Under the Brotherhood-military coalition, Egypt was quickly moving from popularly supported authoritarian rule to popularly supported totalitarian rule; Tahrir activists had the radicalism and the will to slow down this transformation, but did not have the tools to stop it without the military’s pernicious “aid.” Procedure-focused liberal critics of the military intervention completely ignored that under certain conditions, an elected president can help build a totalitarian regime that will render all future elections simple plebiscites. The street needed to act to defend the Egyptian revolution and perhaps even to recall the president. Liberal accounts, with their pronounced fear of the mob, ruled out not only such risky moves, but all other forms of participatory democracy.

As dangerous were the (perhaps well-intentioned) accounts that listed the abuses of the Brotherhood-military regime, but stopped short of discussing the calamities a non-Brotherhood military regime could produce. Those who called the military coup a “second revolution” quickly pointed out all the autocratic moves of the Muslim Brotherhood regime. But they did not explain in what sense the regime that would replace it had the potential of becoming a democracy. (A broader circle of pro-Tamarod intellectuals focused on the illegitimate moves of the toppled president, without going into whether and how these legitimized the moves of the military and judiciary after he was deposed).

The assertion, frequently seen in both English and Arabic, that “all the factors that render January 25 a revolution also legitimize calling June 30 the second revolution” ignored one blatant fact (along many others): 2013 is not 2011. In other words, two years have passed that have led to different social and political possibilities. During these two years, the priority could have been organizing popular power, alternative institutions, and revolutionary leadership in order to prevent (or at least slow down) the increasing authoritarianism of elected powerholders, rather than toppling them to open the way for the old enemies of the revolution.

Some commentators still insist that neither the military nor the National Salvation Front (the coalition of anti-Brotherhood centrist politicians) represents the masses in Tahrir, whose real demand is democracy and early elections. This disclaimer on behalf of the apparently pro-military millions does not alter one of the rules of thumb of politics: Those who cannot represent themselves will be represented.

The fruits of the ideology-less “revolution”

This old statement regarding the French peasantry warns us against the beautification of non-organized masses, a romanticization now in high fashion. Multiple anti-representation theses from rival ideological corners (anarchist, liberal, autonomist, postmodernist, etc.) all boil down to the following assumption: when there is no meta-discourse and no leadership, plurality will win. This might be true in the short-run. Indeed, in the case of Egypt, the anonymity of Tamarod’s spokespersons initially helped: the spokespersons (who are not leaders, it is held) could not be vilified, demonized as partisan populists. Moreover, thanks to uniting people only through their negative identity (being anti-Brotherhood), as well as to its innovative tactics, Tamarod mobilized people of all kinds. Still, the mobilized people fell prey to the only existing option: the old regime!

When the revolutionaries do not produce ideology, demands and leaders, this does not mean that the revolt will have no ideology, demands and leaders. In fact, Tamarod’s spontaneous ideology turned out to be militarist nationalism, its demand a postmodern coup, its leader the feloul (remnants of the old regime). This is the danger that awaits any allegedly leaderless revolt: Appropriation by the main institutional alternatives of the institutions they are fighting against.

It is time to globalize the lessons from the global wave of 2011-2013. Let’s start with the US and Egypt. What we learn from this case is that when movements don’t have (or claim not to have) ideologies, agendas, demands and leaders, they can go in two directions: they can dissipate (as did Occupy), or serve the agendas of others.

We are living in interesting times. Unlike the depressing three decades that stretched from 1980 to 2010, “the people want the system to fall,” as the Arab slogan goes. And the system is very likely to fall, not just in Egypt but in many other places throughout the world (if we keep in mind how reactionary and reform-averse the current leaders and elites, all the way from the White House to the colonies, are: they simply do not want, or are incapable of imagining, New Deal-type frameworks, which could in fact absorb the revolt).

Yet, it is not sufficient for the system to fall. What will replace it? We have been avoiding an answer (for meta-narratives are allegedly dead; well, all meta-narratives but liberalism). We now have to wake up and realize that if we do not develop solid alternatives (and organizations and institutions that will implement them), the downfall of the system will not mean the making of a better world.

Leaderful revolutions

What will happen now? The Egyptian military is very likely to perpetrate neoliberalism, a pro-American foreign policy, and its time-tested authoritarianism. Many sectors of the left already expect nothing from the military; they need no conversion on this issue. But just like the Muslim Brotherhood quickly alienated millions of people in one year of rule, the “new” military regime (which has refurbished itself through appropriating a revolutionary uprising) will show its real face to those who have supported the coup with naïvely democratic expectations. The democratically backed authoritarian “new” regime the military is about to build is very likely to pave the road for a third revolutionary uprising. The left (including not only socialists, anarchists, communists and feminists, but also the left-liberals and left-wing Islamists) needs to use the intervening time to organize the inescapable dissatisfaction with military rule. It has to construct solid alternatives to military democracy and conservative-totalitarian democracy. Based on its experiences throughout the last three years, it should build the leadership, the institutions, and organs of popular power that can implement its alternative vision. In short, this time around, the left needs to be ready.

***

The end of the leaderless revolution does not mean the end of the Egyptian revolutionary process. But it spells the end of the fallacy that the people can take power without an agenda, an alternative platform, an ideology, and leaders.

The leaderless revolution has turned out to be the wrong substitute for the status quo and revolutions that end up in a cult of the leader. What we need is perhaps leaderful rather than leaderless revolutions.

Cihan Tugal is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism.